StageVideo is a huge improvement to Flash Player! By using StageVideo in your applications you can decrease processor usage by up to 85%. It also enables higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity and quality. In addition to leveraging hardware decoding of H.264 video (introduced with Flash Player 10.1), Flash Player can now display and scale video using the GPU as well, performing all calculations in graphics hardware to offload work from the CPU and extend battery life. StageVideo benefits not only H.264 video, but all video codecs in Flash Player are composited by the GPU when StageVideo is used.

If you haven’t seen the StageVideo demo by Tinic Uro at Adobe MAX you may want to check that out first!

Now that you’ve seen the demo it’s time to start building and test your video apps. Using the StageVideo API is really easy. My colleague Mihai Corlan has an excellent blog post on how to add StageVideo to your applications.

While StageVideo is a big and fantastic improvement in Flash Player it is not the only new feature. Developers can now also define custom native mouse cursors. This new feature allows developers to define native mouse cursors, including animated cursors, at the OS level. This eliminates the need for ActionScript code to emulate custom native cursors, increasing performance.

For more information check out Adobe Labs.